dotfiles

so called dotfiles are plain text configuration files on UNIX-like systems named so because they are typically named with a leading . making them hidden.

version control

there are several methods of tracking dotfiles with version control:

• initializing git repo in your $HOME. this is nice because all the files are already in their expected locations, however this is quite messy because of all the files that are located in ~ but are not to be committed. this leads to complicated and extensive .gitignore's and accidentally pushing files that should not have been pushed.
• creating normal repo and symlinking all the files manually / using a homegrown script. this avoids the clutter of the previous solution, however is still extremely error prone, and the organization of directory structure is not obvious.
• using already available solution, like GNU stow, from manpage: stow - manage farms of symbolic links, originally created to manage versions of software like perl. this allows to separate configuration flies into logically distinct packages and install only the ones you want, and let stow worry about fixing broken symlinks and creating directories.

for those reasons GNU stow is used.

installation

most of the packages are simply installable using GNU stow, however some like firefox that do not follow regular location of configuration flies need manual installation / special script. for ones that can be installed using stow run:

stow [ -d <stow-dir> ] [ -t <target-dir> ] <package>

package is the name of the directory containing the configurations, like i3 or nvim. the stow-dir is the directory containing packages (by default current directory), and target-dir is the directory for the packages to be installed in, in this case the home directory (by default the directory one above current directory).

otherwise one can also use the install.sh script that checks if a package contains its install script and runs it or otherwise uses stow.

./install.sh [packages...]

if no package was supplied it installs all packages.

directory structure

because stow is used a specified directory structure of
<package-name>/<path-relative-to-home>
must be used.